Andrew Stacey


Love Poem

And now is the time
of cold mornings and
the need to lay a fire
for endurance
until midday.
The light summer dew
that once wet feet
with abandon
now opens
cold incisions
with a razor of
late morning frost
plastered to the grass
long after it
should have melted.

We bear witness
to the weather,
having no say in it.
With luck we watch
with sufficient advantage
so as not to be caught out
in Bermuda shorts when
something more substantial
should be covering
the skin.

It is the way of all things.
Best to be too hot than too cold.
Best to have four walls and a roof
and not simple faith that
the sky will keep from falling
if we stare at it accusingly,
believing it to have a sense of shame
attacking only from behind.

Winter comes in clock works.
Rings in at 10pm in the day of the year,
resisting until the light of next morning.
Leaving only when everything
is just not quite dead,
blaming the spring for not providing
berries with sufficient haste
to resuscitate the hearts grown cold.



Water Witch

she stands with fourteen years
and a bent green branch
marvelling at how it does
point to the ground so

but if there is water there
it will stay there

finding a thing is not
the same as retrieving it

and fourteen years is
just a green branch
content to drink from what
rain collects in shallow pits
soaks in to the first
three feet of the land

what's the worth
of finding water with a stick
in the backyard
when I can produce it
in the kitchen
with a turn of the wrist
and no flies
to bother me?



Frank James, The Day He Died

I suppose I always knew
I would end here
beneath the same ceiling
bored with the same holes
that permitted the same rain
that wet my mother's belly
the day I was born

but starting in a place
and finishing there
says nothing
of the size of it

you take any point in
Missouri
and you head west
and you head west
and you keep on
and one day you will
find yourself in Missouri again
and there is no one who can say
you haven't seen it all

but so much
of a man's memory
is left to be told
in carved stone
reduced to time and place
and a line from some psalm
so that the time
between extremes
matters very little
if sufficiently inauspicious
the birthing and the dying

the ballads in my
brother's name
seem to have forgotten me
choosing instead
the only thing
we did not share
as chorus and refrain
so that the memory of me
is the small room
that brackets this life
that I remember being
so much bigger

there are none
who sing songs
about my father
with good reason



Andrew Stacey was born north of the Arctic Circle and is currently living on the Tropic of Capricorn. After several years as a graphic designer in the computer game industry in Canada, he now tends goats and pigs and mends fences on a small farm in Argentina. Plum Ruby Review is his first publication.